Weizman and Alessi are currently researching a masterplan that exposes the hidden intention of Israeli planners after the ending of occupation and the settlers’ evacuation. Here architecture appears to collude with oppression, while ghettoising both Israelis and Palestinians. “The landscape has become the battlefield on which power and state control confront both subversive and direct resistance,” Weizman writes in the introduction to his acclaimed book A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture. Planning and the built environment have become blatant political tools, the speakers argue, dominating and determining different life courses as effectively as Foucault’s “biopower.”

Eyal Weizman is Centre Director of Research Architecture at Goldsmiths College, London. Projects based on his human rights research in Israel/Palestine have been shown in New York, Berlin, Rotterdam, San Francisco, Malmo, Tel Aviv and Ramallah. He has organised and lectured at conferences worldwide. He is an author and regular contributor to many journals and magazines. In 2006, he won the James Sterling Memorial Lecture Prize.

Alessandro Petti is an architect and researcher in urban studies at the University Institute of Architecture of Venice, Italy. He is a member of Multiplicity: agency for territorial investigations based in Milan and he is the curator with Sandi Hilal of the research project and exhibition Stateless Nation (2004).